Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Materialistic Lifestyle (Without iPads?????)

Based on the "Capitulary de Villis", I would characterize that the conditions of material life in the Carolingian countryside is somewhat rough.  First of all, I think that these people who own all the stuff, which are most likely lords, are really materialistic and it surprises me.  It's mostly astonishing because I don't except people in this time period to be able to protect their stuff to the extent that we can today.  But that explains the conditions of material life.  Since stewards are basically told to do everything in this excerpt, I believe that keeping these materialistic possessions was difficult and tedious.  I think it was difficult because stewards are in charge of virtually everything here, which indicates how the lords probably needed help with organizing and keeping track of everything.  The excerpt also informs me that lords must have been really lazy or just too egotistic(vocabulary word!) to take care of their own belongings.  They basically sound like little children that need their mommys taking care of everything for them. Or maybe they were genuinely busy people who needed help, I don't know, but keeping track of food, materials, land and people seems really tedious and stressful and lords definitely didn't want to deal with that. Since this excerpt is basically a long, detailed "to-do" list, material life seems to be really difficult in the Carolingian countryside.  There's so many things that need to be accounted for that material life seems pointless and just too much work.  There were definitely people who wanted to steal the materialistic belongings because not everyone is a moral human being.  Thieves, robbers, murderers and other people probably wanted these objects and land that the lords possessed.  It was probably really hard for the stewards to keep track of everything and they were probably liable for anything that went missing or wasn't accounted for.  This shows how the lords probably wanted a form of insurance that their stuff wouldn't be messed with.  None of this seems worth it but clearly there were people who had the mindset of "Stuff! I need more stuff! Stuff makes me look rich and powerful! I like stuff!" Overall, the conditions if material life in the Carolingian countryside seem rough due to the difficulty of the stewards' jobs. 

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